Choice of Evils
by Mad Scientist Sidekick
Summary: The last sacrifice succeeded at the very last minute, and the world went on spinning. The Company is looking for less risky alternatives, but will that mean for the rest of still unaware humanity? And will they be exposed before then? Leaving survivors may not have been the smartest plan. Crossover also includes: Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the Thirteenth, and others
1. Prologue

Prologue

1979

It was a normal enough day for Jed Harrison, driving along in his big rig trying to make New Mexico by morning so he could swing back to Amarillo by his son's seventh birthday.

Normal enough until he saw the boy standing by the side of the road next to an old beater of a pick-up truck, standing with his thumb out. Notable in and of itself in this day and age of horrible things happening everywhere, but there was, of course, the fact the young man was covered head to toe in what looked very much like dried blood. It couldn't have all been his or he'd be dead. Jed immediately hit the brakes, not imagining how he could pass by – the kid didn't look dangerous. He was very slight, judging by his height next to the truck, and he didn't exactly look like a great hulk of a man. Whatever had happened, he surely hadn't been the perpetrator.

The big rig ground to a very slow halt, during which time the young man lowered his thumb but didn't otherwise move. "Are you okay?!" Jed called out the door as he opened it.

"I'm fine," the darkheaded boy answered, but he had a thousand yard stare in his large green eyes.

"Get on in – I'll call for help on the rad …"  
"Please don't," the boy said quickly as he climbed in. He favored one side as he did – the most serious wound Jed could see was a gash in his side that looked very serious, but he was nicked and cut all over and it looked like his palms were burned. From what Jed could tell, the kid was dressed very nicely – like a Mormon or a med student in a pressed white … well, used to be white … shirt and black pants.

"Kid, you need a doctor – and I can tell something awful must have happened, the police need to …"  
"It was just an accident. I … tripped and fell in a thresher …" the boy said, clearly groping for a lie. He didn't have any accent to speak of – he must not be from around here.

"Pick a better lie, son – if you'd have done that you'd have been dead," Jed said. He was quickly growing nervous, realizing he'd made a mistake.

"What size of clothes do you wear?" the boy asked as he looked at Jed appraisingly through thick-rimmed glasses. What Jed had initially taken for shell shock was actually an eerie calm – far too calm for someone who had just been through some unknown hell. Jed ignored the question. "I'm calling the police – they need to get out here …" he turned to reach for the CB … and therein made his second mistake.

Jed gasped as he felt the tie around his neck – the kid had taken off his tie so quickly and quietly he hadn't heard it. The boy had looked so harmless he wasn't on guard, even once he noticed something off about the kid. Jed tried to get his fingers under the tie to loosen it enough to breathe, and failing that clawed at the boy's hands, to no avail. "Don't tell the police _anything_ about me," the kid hissed in his ear just before everything went black.

* * *

1980

Marta waited for a long, unbearable minute. And then, over the sounds of the motorboat, she heard the telltale sound of the fish-man swimming after it, fooled by her deception. "I'm so sorry, Skyler," she whispered, even though she knew Skyler was beyond hearing. Skyler was the only one she could carry – so she'd propped her up in the pilot seat after figuring out she could set off the motorboat to hopefully fool the creature. She was sacrificing a quick getaway, but she'd seen how fast this thing moved – she had no hope if it came down on her with its full speed and strength. At least with the kayak, she had a prayer of escaping its notice for a while, and she could hear it coming without having to listen over the sound of the motor.

When she was sure it was a fair distance away, she pushed the kayak into the water and got in, not gracefully but she didn't tip it over. She paddled until her arms were sore, leaning forward and blocking out everything but listening for danger behind her and the goal of getting to shore. Grief, fear, anger – all of that was pushed into the back of her mind, a dull ache instead of the knock-down pain it would be once she was safe back in civilization again. All that mattered was this kayak, the beach that was still a few hundred feet ahead of her, keeping her ears peeled for _whatever_ the hell it was that had killed her friends, and the flare gun that was her last line of defense if she did hear it.

The slight, pretty Latina finally hit shore – literally hit it. She was paddling so hard and fast and didn't bother slowing down as she approached the shore and she ran the kayak into the damp sand of the beach. It buried itself deep and she felt the jarring impact. She jumped out into shin-deep water, with flare gun still in hand, and ran, not wasting time securing the kayak. She couldn't have given less of a damn about the security deposit if it was only two cents instead of two hundred dollars she was going to have to serve a lot of beer and burgers to make up. She could hear it coming now – she could smell it coming now – she had to go fast. She didn't think it could go very fast on land but she wasn't taking the chance.

She was almost out of the water, almost safe. One last wave rolled in and touched her feet, and then something else did. She whirled around and fire the flare gun right in its evil, fishy face just as it grabbed her ankle. The flare gun went off with so much force it hurt her wrist, but she ignored the pain. It fell back in surprise, scratching her ankle on the way and making an odd gurgling howl of pain, and she ran like hell, adding the pain in her wrist and ankle and the smell of burning fish and the smoke of the flare gun to things she was ignoring. She was finally completely on land, but she didn't stop. She chose the shortest distance up the hill and into the little fishing village, heedless to the branches that tore at her clothes and skin and the sharp unpleasant things that bit into her bare feet as she tore through a wooded area. Now that she was close to help and the creature obviously knew where she was already, she screamed her head off – she screamed, "Fire!" and "Fuego!" alternately, knowing that people would be more likely to help if it might affect them, and also that screaming about a monster or a half-human serial killer or whatever the hell it was would not exactly garner a lot of reliable help.

She made it into the village proper, and her screaming caused several people to come pouring out of their homes. The creature wasn't stupid enough to try to take on so many people at once, and if it did, surely even that horror could be outdone by sheer numbers, assuming of course it was any threat at all on land. She collapsed then onto the paved street, further scraping her knees, and sobbed hysterically as the grief and horror she'd been holding back hit full force and the images of her mutilated friends played through her mind and she imagined having to tell Jack what happened to Skyler … What she had done to get away.

Two locals helped her to her feet and ushered her inside, and the small-town sheriff tried to get the truth out of her. Marta tried to explain but knew she sounded batshit crazy, raving about a half-fish monster eating the faces off her friends and chasing her from the island to the shore, half in English and half in Spanish, but it just didn't occur to her to lie.

Eventually the local doctor came with a sedative, and Marta finally was able to slip into some semblance of peace.

* * *

1981

Officer Martin Cox pulled up slowly, assuming that the call was some kind of prank. He quickly realized it wasn't as he saw the girl, pretty and slight, walking along the side of the dirt road, barefoot and wearing nothing but a University of Chicago t-shirt and (thankfully) the requisite underwear. Her hair was long and blond and put into two ponytails – as he pulled up he could see it looked like she'd gotten wet but dried off now. Troublingly, her shirt was stained with blood that hadn't entirely come out whenever she got wet. She wore a thousand yard stare as she looked straight ahead. She looked up to see the car pull up, stopped, and much to his surprise, smiled broadly. "Sweetie, you okay?" he asked, rolling down the window. The smell of river water was overwhelming – this poor baby must have swam through the river. He couldn't think of her as anything else – he wasn't a young man, he was just a few years from retirement, and he had beautiful twin daughters the same age as the girl. She couldn't have been any older than twenty-two or so – she looked more she was eighteen or nineteen though. Maybe it was the ponytails that made her look so young.

"I think so, Officer," she answered cheerfully. Her feet by now were bloody from walking barefoot so long – as she stood still she alternated from one to the other, wincing as she'd switch.

"Sweetie – are you hurt?" he asked.

"I don't think so, Officer," the girl answered. She had a very think Jersey accent – she wasn't from around here. But she must be going to school in the city … but even so she was a long way from there too. What on Earth had happened?  
"Sweetie, can you tell me your name?" She stood looking at him for a long time, with her head cocked to one side. "What's your name, sweetie?" Cox repeated.

"Ya know what, I don't know," she said after another moment's thought. "I don't remember much at all."

"Why don't you get in, sweetie – I'm gonna take you to the hospital," Cox said, opening the front door. He couldn't bring himself to make her sit in the back like a criminal.

"Okay – can I make the sirens go?" she asked happily as she climbed in.

"Of course you can," Cox said, and then picked up his radio to call in the strange situation. The girl waited patiently while he did so.

Whatever had happened to her, she'd blocked it out – and everything else too.

* * *

1982

The world came perilously close to ending.

Jane Doe slept peacefully through the whole thing in an asylum in Illinois. The time of year meant nothing to her – very little meant much to her. She might have had a vague awareness of having been in the asylum for about a year, but not much else. She slept with a small stuffed animal she'd been given by the staff – a little stuffed bear wearing a University of Chicago t-shirt that she had dubbed Gary Bearstein. The next morning she woke up, had breakfast of dry toast and orange juice, and then went to art therapy, none the wiser to the terror felt by a handful of people in charge of the fate of the other four point six billion people on Earth for several terrifying minutes.

Marta Ortiz remembered her friends with a glass of wine. Several glasses, in fact. In fact she was very, very intoxicated. And despite that intoxication, or perhaps because of it, she was weeping.

She fell asleep in the chair of her little office in the Highgarden house, knocking over a final glass of wine onto the desk in sleep, narrowly missing some of the papers she had received from the library. They all told bizarre stories – of people who claimed to have been attacked by odd creatures, of young people vanishing in clusters, and of bizarre murders. She looked for anything strange – anything that might give her some context for the tragedy that tore apart her life two years prior. But tonight … on the anniversary of the day she came ashore on a beach in Mexico, running for help after a night of hell, there was no purpose or action that could help her state of mind. Only grief and a pungent remembrance of terror.

Marta's grief was undisturbed by the shaking of the Earth in a distant part of the country, or the frantic last-ditch efforts at damage control.

It occurred to Herbert West as he tied his tie that he'd managed to forget the third anniversary of the … unfortunate hastening towards this chapter of his life … two days prior. Losing Charlie was … deeply unfortunate. The others were tragic too … surely. Not that he had known them.

He never did find out if Charlie was the familiar form of Charlotte or something more atypical, such as Charlene or Charlize. She'd always refused to say. They had been her friends, mostly, the other victims.

He went on to class at the Swiss medical school where he was technically registered as Jonas Darwin but everyone referred to him by his actual name. His assumed name appeared on all official paperwork but he still introduced himself as Herbert West – he hoped he was safe that way.

Microbiology was a tough beast even for him – the only person in their cohort who found the course easy was a future pathologist who'd volunteered in a hospital lab as an undergraduate. Herbert had tried to ingratiate himself with her to get study help and failed handily – that tended to happen, unfortunately. So it had to be conquered with sheer force of will – he studied alone for hours on end in the library or his little apartment, determined to conquer the subject.

After class he returned to his apartment, poured himself coffee and opened the supplemental textbook the professor had "suggested." He was vaguely aware of a slight tremor in the Earth, but it ended soon enough and there were no earthquakes in this part of the world so he dismissed it as his own imaginings brought on by a medical student's overreliance on coffee, unaware of how close all his worries had been to being over.

* * *

Director of Operations Ann Darvis had spent the last fourteen years terrified of these words, imagined them being said in so many ways so many nights as she tried in vain to fall asleep. And yet, they were unimaginable.

"The last sacrifice has failed. The Ancient Ones are waking," Collier, the head of mission control, intoned, her voice hollow from complete and utter terror. A low, ominous alarm blared – headquarters had just entered a red alert situation. For the first and last time.

"Tell all facilities to trigger containment procedures," Darvis commanded with what remained of her calm. The containment procedures had never been tested – but they were projected to fail. Most likely they would just serve to slow the Ancient Ones down for a few hours, long enough, perhaps to mobilize the militaries of the countries beneath which they slumbered, who then may or may not be able to stop them. Most likely not, and if they did it would surely be with thousands if not millions of civilian casualties, to say nothing of the soldiers who would lay down their lives or the societal chaos that would ensue after this revelation. As unimaginable as it was, millions of dead was now the best case scenario.

"The Delta base is not responding," Collier said, emotion in her voice again. "It looks like there was a system purge … Oh God … a system purge without security measures in place …" A system purge was used to glass a facility in case of emergency – all the monsters were released directly into the hallway full of the thing that could kill them. Why in God's name had Delta been triggered in the first place, especially without security measures? Not that it mattered now.

"Take over and do it remotely," Darvis commanded. They had a back-up system so that the central command could take over any facility as needed.

"I'm trying … oh God, it started there, it may already be too late …" So this was it. Even if the containment measures at the other four facilities, against all odds, actually worked, even if the military could make a dent against them … America was going to be gone very soon. That was the absolute best case scenario.

"Ruskin, Juarez, implement protocol Gojira, the rest of you get Delta facility online!" Darvis commanded, though she knew they were already trying. Ruskin and Juarez sent messages to the military of all countries, starting with those beneath whom the Ancient Ones slumbered who would therefore be affected first and then all the countries around them in an outward spreading wing until anybody with a military that was anything more than teenagers with pistols knew something big was about to happen. Darvis' eyes fell on Collier as she worked frantically, her fingers flying over the keys so quickly they almost seemed a blur, only betraying her panic with muttered curses as she worked. Her colleagues were just as diligent and brave – all except one, a new father barely back from parental leave who started to weep uncontrollably as nothing he or anyone else did worked to bring the Delta facility online. His family lived just a hundred miles away from it.

There was nothing more to do. Nothing more to try. Every sacrifice this year had failed. Darvis closed her eyes and tried to breathe, tried not to think of her nieces and nephews … tried not to think of her own life … tried not to think of all the young people that had died in vain to prevent this very thing … Begged for forgiveness and mercy from a God she hadn't believed in since seeing what slumbered under the Earth … prayed at the very least the other containment fields would hold …

And then, as suddenly as the alarm had started, the alarms stopped. Darvis didn't dare breathe – she didn't dare believe that it was really over. "That's it. Readings on all ancient ones are returning to normal, according to all outposts except Delta," Collier announced, her tone not as joyous as you would expect – like Darvis, she wasn't sure she believed it.

"And Delta?" Darvis asked. She could guess what had happened – the sacrifice had worked at the very last minute, probably because the young people who started the mess happened to die in the right order from the chaos they themselves had unleashed, and the Ancient Ones had gone back to sleep, too exhausted from a long slumber to awake at such a small overshoot of the deadline.

"I've got Delta!" Jenkins, the new father, called. He must have still been doing good work despite his weeping – of course no one got this far unless they could be cool no matter the crisis. "And I can now say all four entities are returning to sleep."

A cheer went up through all of headquarters then, and Darvis knew that the controllers in the three other major facilities cheered too. Darvis took a sharp intake of breath – it was over.

Well … not over. God only knew what had escaped Delta facility during the system purge, and all of the personnel there would have to be replaced and equipment repaired, which would be dangerous and arduous and probably meant Delta was out of the running for next year …

And even with four parallel sacrifices, this year had proven something could go wrong with each and every single one. Perhaps Alpha, Beta, and Gamma should double up, just to hedge their bets …

Or maybe it was time to dust off their other options.

As soon as she thought about it for even a second, Darvis knew the answer. This system was too perilous, too fraught with risk for the unaware citizens of Earth. "Collier, contact all heads of department, inform them there's an emergency meeting to take place now, by phone, in my office. We need to discuss what happened and how to prevent it next year. Tell them I'm putting Project Theseus back on the table."

* * *

 **Author's Note**

Cover Image: "Halloween 2014" by UnidColor. Found on Deviantart. Used by permission.

Welcome to this story! I suppose. Gonna be posting it over the month of October assuming of course life doesn't prevent me from finishing it in that time frame. I only recently lost my horror movie virginity after a lifetime of wussiness so you know what the problem is if I make any n00b goofs.

Yes I'm fudging the hell out of the timeline. _Cabin in the Woods_ clearly did not happen in 1982, and if you assume that release date is the year it takes place unless otherwise stated within the film, I'm also going to have to fudge the timeframe of _Halloween_ and the _Friday the Thirteenth_ sequels slightly. But compared to saying Myers is under a Gaelic curse to eliminate his clan or whatever that was and sending Jason to space, I don't think fudging the timeline by a matter of a few years is the worst crime to befall either of those franchises.

I defend the use of the merman by noting it was released from a different facility so Hadley wouldn't have seen it in action up close and personal, yet because it had been used so recently at another facility everyone was well aware of the fact it makes a mess. A big mess.


	2. Chapter 1: The Job

Chapter 1

The Job

Retired homicide detective Francis Hernandez pulled up to an enormous white house in Katy, Texas – a suburb of Houston. He double-checked the address Mr. Highgarden's personal assistant had related over the phone – he'd hate to knock on the wrong door. Seeing that he was indeed in the right place, he made his way up the long garden path and knocked on the door. It was almost immediately answered by the maid. The Highgardens were clearly rich as hell. The entryway alone was bigger than Frank's whole apartment. The retired detective with gray in his hair and beard tried not to stare at it like a rube, and instead looked over the housekeeper who had let him in – her hands were shaking. Whatever the man of the house wanted to talk about – it shook her too. "Do you know why your boss wanted to speak to me?" he asked.

"I think he wanted to … he wants somebody to look into what happened to Skyler and Marta … his daughter and my granddaughter … and their friends last year," she said haltingly.

"What did happen – that you know about?"

"I … I don't know. No one knows. They just … they went down to a private beach for spring break and Marta was the only one who came back." Frank had heard rumors about the incident – he was from the big city so it wasn't like they were kids he had watched grow up, but he was sure he'd seen it on the six o'clock news a few times. A bunch of rich kids from the suburbs heading down to Mexico to have a good time, something crazy happened, and only one kid came back raving like a lunatic. They suspected her for a little while but the police quickly decided she wasn't very likely to have been the perpetrator – it was hard to imagine a tiny girl taking on five other kids, especially when three of them were athletes. The theory of the crime was that several assailants had attacked the vacationing Americans for whatever reason, and one kid – Marta – managed to narrowly escape with her life and was so traumatized by the attack that she had a mental breakdown. They never found the bodies of the other kids – they'd been staying out on a little island near the shore – but there was a ton of blood and miscellaneous tissue found at the scene, more blood belonging to each of the missing kids than they could have lost and survived. The going theory was the bodies were thrown in the ocean and carried away by waves and eaten by sharks. Frank had no idea what he could possibly add to that … he had his contacts yes but unless Marta had brought herself to remember something, there wasn't much he could do. Surely that was it – Marta had remembered something, and Mr. Highgarden wanted to consult with a professional about it before going to the actual authorities.

"Mr. Highgarden will see you now," the personal assistant Frank had spoken to said and stuck her head into the entryway. Frank followed her into a living room bigger than most houses, with thick white carpet and various pieces of expensive-looking furniture that probably cost more than Frank's whole house. A late middle-aged man, presumably the man of the house, sat on one beige-colored couch next to a young woman, presumably Marta. Frank extended his hand to both in turn, and after the customary handshake took a seat on the matching loveseat across the coffee table from them. Marta seemed to stare right through him – she was a tiny girl, maybe five feet tall, and she looked young for her age, but there was a look of determination in her amber-colored eyes that few could match. There was a huge binder, filled to bursting with something or other, at her side. "So, Detective Hernandez," Mr. Highgarden started.

"Oh, it's just Mr. Hernandez now," Frank said quickly. He didn't want to encourage whatever crazy ideas they had.

"Mr. Hernandez. You're probably wondering why I brought you here."  
"Well, yes, sir, though I can guess it has something to do with the tragedy in Mexico. I'm sorry for your loss, sir, but I'm not sure …"  
"There's a pattern," Marta said, cutting him off.

"I'm sorry?" Frank asked. A pattern to what?  
"I wanted to figure out if … anybody had a similar experience to me. I started checking every news source I could find … sometimes weird news sources. I started with just any unexplained disappearance, and then I picked up a pattern. There's a lot of cases of whole groups of teenagers or young adults disappearing, usually in groups of four or five but sometimes more," she said, lifting the heavy binder at her side and handing it to Frank. "But there's a really weird thing … when it's four, there's usually one survivor, always a girl, who either has no idea what happened to the others or was telling some kind of crazy story … like I did with the fish man." Frank, already uncomfortable when she started speaking, reluctantly took the binder and flipped through it. The very first story he opened to wasn't promising – it did indeed describe what she had, but it was from a very unreliable-looking paper. One of those that had "weird stories" about Bigfoot and the like.

"Look, I know it sounds crazy … but I know what I saw," she said adamantly. Mr. Highgarden put a hand on her shoulder. "I might have had to lie to certain people to get out of the hospital … but I never doubted it, I never had to lie to myself."

"And I believe her," Mr. Highgarden added. "I know it seems crazy – half the sources in there are not exactly reputable. But it's … just so distinctive of a pattern. That's why we wanted to have a professional look at it – to see if there was anything to these in local reports."

"And then … figure out what's going on, if there is anything," Marta added. So there was self-awareness in the claims she was making – she knew it wasn't necessarily believable, but she was convinced nonetheless.

"I'd be willing to pay you for your time, regardless of the outcome," Mr. Highgarden added. "I'll match whatever you were getting on the force."

"Why me instead of a private detective?"  
"We thought that police officers might be more willing to talk to another officer rather than a PI," Marta said. Fair enough. Frank looked from the young woman to the man of the house, who had a hand on her shoulder like a father, knowing that she'd been through something awful and he'd lost a daughter to it.

"I can't make any promises …" he said after a long moment of hesitation. "But I'll look into it."

* * *

 _Everything was bright and white and sterile. And cold. It had been for a long time._

 _The only escape was into the boy's mind, and it wouldn't last long. He was somewhere far away – somewhere cold. Not that that was any different. But it was warm in his apartment – a weirdly orderly little place that belied the age of the occupant._

 _The boy was asleep in his bed, shirtless despite the cold but buried in blankets, more peaceful in sleep than he looked in any photograph._

 _He was a very pretty boy – fair but darkheaded, slight and thin but strong in a wiry way._

 _He was too old, and yet there was an innocence and inexperience about him that made him … interesting._

 _He smelled too old – his neck still carried the lingering scent of cologne presumably put on the morning before, and his sweat bore the unmistakable scent of adulthood – but the way he trembled when a pretty girl ran her fingers down his neck … Oh how he trembled …_

 _And his eyes were too large for his face, like a child's eyes. "Charlie?" he asked in shock as those beautiful eyes popped open._

" _Why did you run away, Herbie?" Charlie asked, and then her throat opened and blood poured out into the boy's bed and onto the boy himself._

 _And he looked worryingly unfazed by this. He flinched at first, but then shook his head and sat up, wiping blood from his face and reaching for a pair of thick-rimmed glasses on his nightstand. "You're dead, Charlie. It doesn't matter to you," he said, and reached under the bed for something, which turned out to be a hunting rifle. Time to retreat._

 _Damn. Kid had nerves of steel._

 _Everything was sterile and white and cold again – the boy's lack of fear made his mind too hard to hold onto._

 _Soon. Soon the boy would be afraid, soon his mind would be warm and pulsating, full of tremulous fear, turning against him._

 _And then … then Freddy could have some real fun._


	3. Chapter 2: Nightmares

Chapter 2

Nightmares

"Jane" was glad that they let her take Gary Bearstein with her to therapy. It made her feel slightly more comfortable.

She wished they didn't call her Jane – she'd name herself something more creative. She thought she was probably a Tiffany, or at least someone who fit that name. It wasn't her real name though. She didn't think.

"How are you feeling today, Jane?" Dr. Weller asked.

"I'm feeling okay I guess," Tiffany answered.

"Are you sure about that?"  
"… no. I'm bored. I think I was a student or something – I want to go back to that," she tried to explain. She thought she was a nursing student – she was familiar with all the equipment in the hospital, and she knew she had been somewhere like this place before. Only she was fairly certain it was an old folk's home – she seemed to remember it being so, even though she couldn't remember anything specifically.

"We'd like to help you do that – either by helping you remember who you are and get you back to your life, or helping you move on to another life here." They just had to make sure she could live alone – and she wasn't ready to do that, by any means. She was fine until the lights went out – then she lived in terror. From the time the lights went off at nine o'clock until the sun came up at seven the following morning, she lay in her bed, clutching Gary Bearstein, with ears peeled for any sound, heart racing, until she finally gave in and fell asleep. If she woke up needing to use the bathroom, she'd hold it until the morning, rather than step off the bed. She was terrified of what might be underneath it. Sometimes the terror became so great that she started to weep through the night. And sometimes …

"The night nurses said that you cry out sometimes at night – do you have nightmares?" Tiff's face got hot and her stomach tightened …

" _Are you okay Jake?" she called down the hall. The long, seemingly endless, incredibly dark, dark, dark hallway. "Jake!" she called, more adamantly._

 _Jake didn't answer. Something else did._

"No ma'am," Tiffany insisted, and put on a big smile. "No nightmares at all."

* * *

 _Too old, all of them. But beggars can't be choosers._

 _The blond, middle-aged secretary collapsed in terror at the sight of the fish monster her company had unleashed tearing apart her young son and spewing blood from it's back, waking herself up with hysterical tears._

 _The college-age intern who had no idea what she was working on screamed until her roommate woke her when confronted by an eerie burned face leering at her from the darkness._

 _The dark-headed douchebag manager went to pieces just at the thought of someone pushing the system purge button, unleashing all the ghouls and ghosties to have fun. He woke himself, shaking in fear and sobbing before any monsters even showed up._

 _Scaring them was easy, almost too easy – and all too soon, the blocks were back up. The only escape from cold sterility was, once again, the science student somewhere cold._

 _If only he would sleep._

* * *

The prone corpse of mouse 16-A twitched promisingly. Vital signs were promising. Herbert leaned so close his breath ruffled the white fur of the recently deceased mouse. But it didn't move again. The medical monitoring equipment modified for the tiny creature confirmed there was no further activity. "Damn it!" he said hotly as dropped the empty syringe onto the lab bench and leaned back.

"Now, now, Herbert … we're making progress at least," Herr Gruber said from the other end of the bench. He had watched just as intently, but seemed to take this most recent failure in stride. That wasn't surprising – he had been working towards this end all his life, and had either learned or always been possessed of more patience than his young protégé.

"I really thought we had it," the younger man said, his voice cooled to it's usual calm.

"Each attempt brings us closer – remember that even incremental progress brings us closer to the goal. Science cannot be hurried, Herbert," the older man said kindly, ever patient with his student's impatience. "We know now that the increase in epinephrine has produced stronger results – let's go back to the tissue samples and determine if further increases improve the effect, or if we need to move on to other components."  
"Of course, Herr Doktor," Herbert answered and reached for his black notebook.  
"In the morning, Herbert – go and get some rest," the doctor said, just a bit more sternly. He was a kind man, perhaps too kind, and with his own children flown from the nest (and none of them following his footsteps into science) he often acted in a fatherly way towards his young protégé. Herbert never quite knew how to feel about that, and he hoped but was not entirely certain his response was always graceful.

Herbert looked at his watch and realized that it was, indeed, very late at night, well after most people had quit working. Well, most non-scientists anyway – half the "pure" scientists came in very late in the morning or even in the afternoon and stayed at work until evening to make up for it. Herbert made it a point to be here when his mentor got there at nine in the morning, yet frequently stayed long after five. And often he took his notes or background reading home with him – he was dedicated and everyone knew it. Perhaps too dedicated, in the minds of some, but conquering death was no minor pursuit, and Herbert had no intention to give it anything less than his whole being. "I suppose I should head home and get something to eat," he said in response, but he still took the black notebook. He wanted to make notations while it was still fresh in his mind.

"Do you need a ride?"

"No, thank you, Herr, I'll be fine," he answered as he put on his coat and gloves – it was cold outside, but no longer unbearably so.

Switzerland was really very pretty – especially in twilight at this time of year, when there was still snow on the ground but it was no longer bitterly cold. He was from New England anyway … it's not like he was a complete stranger to winter. His cheeks and ears turned red with the cold and he could see his breath in a fog, but he didn't feel as though he were in danger of frostbite, as he would have just a few weeks earlier – it was nice, really.

He stopped for a bit as he crossed the bridge over a little stream that was close to his building, looking down into the crystal clear water. The stream ran deeper and more swiftly than it usually did due to snow melt. Watching the water run, he turned over the newest formula in his mind, along with possible modifications, and other considerations. Would it perhaps help to provide a blood transfusion to the subject at some point during the process …

"Guten abend," came a voice from behind. Herbert spun on his heel to see who had spoken, and found an older gentleman. He'd never exactly _liked_ people – he usually preferred his own company, and social interactions were generally something of a chore for him. Even four years ago, he'd have been annoyed at the intrusion, at having to break his train of thought in order to conduct empty niceties. But that was then – now there was fear in it too. When he turned to the older gentleman, his eyes went first to see if he was armed. He didn't appear to be, but he didn't let his guard down, not yet. " _I'm sorry I startled you_ ," the man said apologetically in German. It only took a few seconds for Herbert to find the proper response – by now he spoke the language fairly fluently.

" _It's quite all right,_ Herr _, I was just lost in thought_." He tried to keep the surliness out of his voice.

" _Oh, one of the students, eh? Sorry to disturb you – go on curing cancer_ ," the man said jocularly, and walked on.

Herbert waited until the man was gone, then very quickly made his way the rest of the way home. A soon as he got in, he locked the door and fastened the chain bolt behind him. Even though he knew it would do little good if they really did come for him – perhaps his hope was that it would take them longer to get the door broken down and therefore give him more time to prepare to defend himself.

He was angry with himself for disparate reasons – for letting his guard down enough to stop and stare at nature like some damn hippie while out in the open, and for being paranoid enough to be easily startled by a little old man.

There were really only two possibilities. Either the Company didn't care that he'd survived, and all this was for nothing, or the Company did still want him dead but hadn't found him yet, in which case he couldn't be paranoid enough. Well, perhaps there was a third option – maybe they only operated within the United States. Even then, it seemed unlikely they couldn't find even one willing Eurotrash assassin, if they really cared about killing him.

Whatever the case, there was nothing to be done at the moment, except fix supper and get ready for bed. He could do nothing to change the situation with the Company.

* * *

 _The sound came again. Herbert wanted to ignore it, but it was louder now and just outside._

 _He climbed out of bed and reached for the previous day's clothes, and also for the rifle under his bed._

 _He went to the door slowly, listening for any noise outside. He heard it again – a soft woman's voice, calling to him. Which was alarming enough on it's own, but …_

" _Herbert! Help me!" she called. It was a loud cry, but from far away. So what was it he'd heard that woke him in the first place?_

 _He should stay inside. That was the only sane, logical thing to do._

" _Herbert! Help me!" But the voice was different now._

" _Mother?" he stammered._

" _Herbert! Please!" she called again, and it seemed louder and closer now. Herbert was out the door before he was even aware of it, heading towards the sound of his mother's voice. He knew it was hers, even though he hadn't heard it since he was eight-years-old._

 _He should be outside in the cold, but instead he was in the funeral home in which he grew up, in the foyer. And there was a viewing going on and he wasn't dressed for …_

 _Yes he was. He was a little boy again, dressed very sharply even then in a black suit._

 _The body in the casket was familiar. It was a redheaded girl, probably college-age … Charlie?!_

 _As soon as he recognized her, she lifted her head and then sat up, and stared straight through him as though she didn't see him, but rather was fascinated by something behind him. No one reacted except Herbert. He turned away in shock, closing his eyes and covering his ears. "The dead are dead and they're going to stay that way until judgment day," he whispered to himself under his breath, the saying his mother had taught him when he was afraid of the corpses that were the family business. That hadn't happened often once he was over a very young age – you couldn't grow up around something and still find it terrifying. Most nights._

" _Maybe it's judgment day, Herbie," a man said from somewhere in front of him. Herbert didn't want to open his eyes and look, and yet he was sorely tempted to. "Have you been a good boy, Herbie?" the man asked. Herbert felt an infernal heat on his face. "I don't think you have been." His voice was awful – it sounded somewhat distorted, and was gravelly and full of psychotic mirth. Herbert felt a hand on his shoulder, but also something else – something like knives. The man put his other hand under his chin and slowly lifted his face towards him, and leaned so close Herbert could feel the man's hot breath on his face, all while the heat he had initially felt got more intense and seemed to burn his tender skin. He opened his eyes to see – and wished he hadn't._

 _The man was surrounded by the hellfire Grandfather was always raving would come and get the wicked, and already viciously burnt by it with blistered … no_ melted _skin all over his face, and the similarly burned hand on Herbert's shoulder was attached to knives or something. He screamed at the top of his lungs._

And kept right on screaming in the waking world.

Herbert sat up straight, and muttered curses replaced the scream. He was soaked in sweat, dripping with it even, his heart hammering so fast he could feel his pulse in his throat. He put his face in his hands, trying to get his breathing under control. _What a ridiculous dream,_ he thought and almost managed a laugh. Mother had been gone since he was eight, and he hadn't lived in the funeral home for very long after she passed away. He hadn't been much older when he stopped believing in Hell and Judgment Day … probably the only good thing about his selfish father dragging him across the country and away from everything he knew to heathen California. He had no idea why that imagery would show up now of all times – but if anyone truly understood dreams, there wouldn't be so much superstition about them.

Herbert glanced at his clock and saw it was two in the morning – he knew he wouldn't sleep again for a while, so he sighed and reached for his glasses. He might as well read that paper by that intellectually limited plagiarist Carl Hill and see just _how_ shameless it really was – surely it couldn't be as bad as he'd heard …

There was a sharp knock on the door. Herbert tensed again all over, any progress he'd made towards slowing his heart rate rapidly reversed. He reached for the gun under the bed and headed for the door, realizing as he went that this was exactly how the nightmare from which he'd just awoken started …

The knocking became more frantic, and he almost didn't go to it.

"Mr. West? Are you all right? The Holtzers phoned and said they heard screaming," his landlady called through in heavily accented but flawless English. He took a deep breath and sighed in relief, and set the gun down before going to the door. He unlocked it but kept the chain bolt on and opened it a crack.

"I'm all right, Frau Bauer, I just … had a nightmare," he said through the door. It was embarrassing to admit – but he had to if he didn't want any further fuss. He should have realized the Holtzers would hear him. He certainly heard their newlywed marital bliss seemingly every night.

"You poor thing!"

"I'm all right, really," he said, fighting to keep the annoyance from his voice. He was not a child – but he knew too many people saw him that way. Because he was slight and had a young face, and here in Switzerland he was an outsider. Well, more of an outsider.

"Of course – I'll tell the Holtzers there's nothing to worry about. Try to get some sleep." _Well, it would help if you left …_

"Thank you for your concern, Frau Bauer, have a good night."

"You too, Mr. West."

He shut the door, locked it, and retrieved the journal with the offending submission, failing to notice the smattering of ash on his shoulder.


	4. Chapter 3: Patterns

Chapter 3

Patterns

The first rule of surviving working for the Company was simple enough to learn, but sometimes hard to follow: Always trust Downstairs.

One complication is that their will wasn't always clear. Sometimes it was as clear as instructions frequently appeared on a computer without any apparent input by any of the technical employees. Other times it was more obscure.

Like when, very far out of season, the containment field that held the freaky "dream demons" in check lit up and moved into release position for no apparent reason. People in Delta Facility panicked – they didn't know what to do. They didn't know if they were about to become the victims of an impromptu sacrifice or if the horrors they kept in check there were about to be released on the unsuspecting world at large en masse. The director of operations who had preceded Ann Darvis, Hank Brody, had made the executive decision to tell Delta Facility to let them out, and needless to say the staff at Delta was not happy – it was a wonder if didn't lead to a full-on riot. The ethereal little monsters took off without harming anyone in the facility, but soon became untraceable not long after they were gone from it. Nobody understood where they had gone or what had happened for forty-eight hours … until a new monster showed up on their doorstep, with no sign of who put it there, and was easily ushered into containment. A pitiful thing in it's current form, a charred, blackened dead thing with no detectable signs of life … yet, inexplicably never decayed further and seemed to cause nightmares to everyone in the vicinity if the containment chamber (the same that had held the dream demons) wasn't fully active. There was clearly something supernatural at work with it – but for what of the creatures wasn't that a case? The terror briefly felt in Delta Facility faded, and caused the main North American facility to be the butt of many jokes from those at headquarters and the other facilities.

Epilogue: Eighteen years later, the mysterious charred corpse was (obviously) one of the few monsters to remain behind in the disaster of '82, and was transferred to Beta Facility for the time being.

* * *

The first think Frank did after interviewing Marta for details of her – admittedly crazy-sounding – recollection of events was spread out all the news stories Marta had gathered and meticulously highlighted across his living room. He started with the less kooky sources – small town newspapers and the like. They were all disappearances – always exceedingly baffling. They all had the same pattern Marta had noticed.

The stories came from all over the country. Most of them happened around the same time – in late spring. Almost always five high school or college kids, now and again six or seven, and either all disappeared or all of them did but one. The lone survivor, always a girl or woman, often was found with bizarre injuries and an even more bizarre story. One claimed to have escaped a maniac with a sledge hammer after luring him into an old-fashioned steel bear trap, another claimed to have shot a werewolf to death by loading Rosary beads into a shotgun, another claimed to have gotten into their car and run over at least one cannibal hillbilly. But in no case were the bodies of the survivor's friends or the body of the creature they claimed to have killed been found. It all lined up with Marta's story.

As he looked at the stories he added details that Marta had either missed or hadn't thought to tell him. These kids were usually always away from home when this happened – either relatively close, as in the case of Marta and her friends, or clear across the country from home. It was almost always in a rural area. In stories that gave enough detail he could make out these things, some demographic information became very clear. In the by-far most common case of the five missing persons or four missing persons and one survivor, it was almost always three men or boys and two women or girls. If there were extra it could go either way. It was almost always white kids – most of the cases of missing black or Spanish kids were when more than five kids were involved. Black and Spanish girls were very, very rare among the survivors – so far as he could tell Marta was the only one who wasn't as white as the driven snow. The survivors were never exactly the girls you'd expect to survive this kind of thing – most of them weren't athletes, and if they were they weren't exactly the "only girl on the football team" types. All were traditionally pretty, most were described as smart and kind. Which was another thing – there always was an athlete and a super smart kid. He saw now why Highgarden believed her – it was absurdly specific.

Frank couldn't imagine how long it had taken Marta to find these – she must have skimmed every article in issue after issue of random, trashy tabloids and small town newspapers from faraway places that she happened to stumble upon in bookstores and libraries. God only knew how many more were out there.

So what was going on? Kidnappers? Why would they leave one kid – and why did they all have some weird story? He thought back to when he interviewed Marta – she'd come across like either the best damn liar in the world or someone who very adamantly believed her friends had been killed by some kind of fish monster. But she also mentioned that at a certain point things got hazy and it became hard to think. So that would imply some kind of hallucination – drugs maybe? Maybe the kidnappers drugged the kids to make them easier to control – but wouldn't sedatives or something work better than hallucinogens?

Maybe it was some freaky Satanic thing – it definitely sounded like a ritual.

But he was getting ahead of himself, wasn't he? He was basing all of this on stories in the Middle of Nowhere Gazette and UFO News. It could be … some kind of elaborate prank. Somehow.

The former at least gave him an option to verify – he could call and ask to speak to someone familiar with the case. If it seemed legitimate, and it wasn't too terribly far, he might even head out and talk to the girls.

* * *

It had taken months to be ready to take back her job, but once she did Marta felt better. Which was ironic – before the incident, if you'd have told her that getting yelled at by drunks because the bowling alley only had their particular brand of rare brewed-in-the-mountains-of-Mexico beer in bottles instead of on tap or because the cooks were taking too long to cook their burger well-done would be soothing in it's own way, she would have laughed hysterically.

She spent long days and nights behind the counter, taking orders, serving drinks, cleaning, and helping cook food whenever she could. When things were so hectic – when there was a line all the way from the bar in front of lane one to the entryway in front of lane fifteen, and all of them wanted some ridiculously complicated thing, and all of them were drunk and grumpy, there was no time to think about the fish man. There was no time to think about carrying Skyler to the boat. There was no time to think about Jenna and Kevin's blood floating to the surface, followed by what was left of them. There was no time to remember Mario's heroic but doomed attempt to charge the creature. There was no time to remember watching the _thing_ biting into Wayne's face. No time to remember Skyler's blood seeping under the door from the bedroom to the balcony … No time to remember slowly opening the door, knowing what was on the other side …

In the asylum that was all she had seen, all she'd been able to think about. But here it was burger orders, pizza orders, pouring beer to just the right point, cutting off drunks and getting cursed at for it, the sound of bowling bowls striking pins, the ever present smell of grease and beer, cleaning the counter, "Electric Avenue" played ad nauseum on the jukebox, and con artists trying to get a free beer or order of fries, and white trash ordering a feast for themselves and two sprites and a small order of cheese fries for their six kids to share. It was exhausting and repetitive and frustrating and infuriating. But it wasn't the fish man.

She'd work her long shift and then go home and clean up, strengthened by the time away from her dark thoughts. The night after a shift or the day after a night shift she could spend hours researching, poring over newspapers and magazines and scouring the library and seemingly every bookstore in the Houston area for books that referenced mysterious disappearances. If she did that all day every day, she'd probably go mad – but the time at work forced her to get out of her head and out of the books now and again.

She had objected very strongly to her boss's plans to add a fish sandwich to the menu.

* * *

Frank got started calling police departments bright and early. He had operators put him through to the police department in Tillkeepsie, New York. The girl who said she shot a werewolf was from there, all though the attack had happened elsewhere. The dispatcher confirmed all the relevant details – the paper hadn't exaggerated at all, all though she felt they were a bit credulous of the girl's story. The case was technically open and the survivor, Katie Hawkins, was a person of interest. The dispatcher suggested Frank call the sheriff department in the town where it happened to get more details on the investigation, so that's exactly what Frank did.

By the end of the day, he had called twelve PD's and sheriff's departments, having checked up on eight cases. So far they all correlated with the stories – even the two he followed up on from the tabloids. It would take a while but he should keep calling and try to confirm these details – maybe they'd be able to tell him something useful.

If this was a cult, it was a very well-connected one. The disappearances spread all over the nation and flawlessly executed – Marta's group was one of the very few that left anything at all behind and, well, considering what a big mystery that was, that said something for the efficiency of the clean-up for these incidents.

But they couldn't be _everywhere_ … could they?

It was time to do some work with a map and an atlas.

* * *

Tiffany didn't have much contact with "the dangerous ones," for obvious reasons. Most of the patients at Smith's Grove Sanitarium would never hurt anyone, except perhaps themselves. But there were a few patients that the rest of the staff warned them about – a girl who'd burned her whole family to death, a man who'd killed a bunch of dogs …

And Michael.

Objectively, Hannah, the girl who'd killed her whole family, should be scarier. She'd killed all of them in such a horrible way. But they were apparently abusive assholes, and Hannah was found on a street corner in her underwear sobbing and screaming about demons taking her family. Michael …

Michael was cold.

Tiffany had met him in art therapy. She hadn't known who he was or why he was there at the time, but she knew there were two guards watching him like a hawk, so she knew he was one of the criminal ones. She went to talk to him anyway – she wasn't scared of them. Hannah was sweet and timid and would probably never hurt anyone else, Jack the dog killer was a pitiable ranting lunatic. Tiffany and Hannah became fast friends, and sometimes when Tiffany was with her, her memories became something like a word on the tip of your tongue – it was annoying, but she always hoped one day she'd actually remember something. She avoided Jack, but only because she didn't want to cry in front of him. "Hi, what's your name?" she asked the freakishly tall, handsome, dark-headed young man about her age. Presumably, she didn't actually know how old she was exactly. The guards looked up in alarm that she even approached him, which didn't exactly set her mind at ease. He didn't answer, only looked up at her, looking her over like he was making some kind of calculations. He probably was – sociopaths were wired to view other people as math problems, and in hindsight that's likely what he was. It occurred to her he could kill her with his bare hands – he was so massive and she was so tiny it would be easy for him – and a wave of fear ran through her as she realized, with a terrifying certainty, that that was _exactly_ what he was thinking too. He gave her the creeps in a way no one ever had – she was an open, trusting person, and she was certain that even before whatever had happened to her that brought her here, she'd always been the type to make friends easily.

"Um … I guess I'll just go paint over there," she said nervously.

"That's a good idea, miss," one of the guards said warningly, and Tiffany hurried back to her station.

She only found out later he had murdered his older sister when he was just six-years-old, and that he worried the staff and they'd always campaigned to keep him inside the high security wing. He was never in art therapy with her again – she never found out why they changed it, and she never wanted to know.

* * *

 **1979**

"How's Delta doing?" Darvis asked as she nursed the black coffee she always drank on the long, uncertain sacrifice nights this time of year.

"See for yourself," Tim Wilson answered and gestured to the big screen. Wilson, a promoted techie, was way too proud of the new, secure broadcast equipment that let them watch the sacrifices live. For most of the employees at Headquarters, it made it all a little too real – it's not that they were in the dark about what the sacrifices entailed, but most of them hadn't had to actually watch teenagers and young adults get slaughtered since they'd been promoted from the local facilities, and what they'd seen there often hadn't been detailed. But they'd adapted, even developing morbid jokes and betting pools with the advantage of seeing it live.

The pig man was more horrifying than one might think based on description – its features were just human enough to trigger every internal alarm about it. That face alone was the stuff of nightmares. To say nothing of its sharp tusks and vicious teeth or the meat cleaver in its hand.

Those vicious teeth sunk into the calf of Herbert West, this particular sacrifice's scholar. "And here we go," Wilson said coolly. "Two birds, one stone." Darvis watched, almost disinterestedly, as the young college student kicked with his other leg, his aim true and striking the monstrosity in the eye, hard enough to make it break its grip. He scurried back from the creature on his elbows, trying to put any amount of distance between himself and his impending demise. It was hard not to root for him – in a different world, a better world, he would have been going to medical school in a little over a year, to earn both a medical degree and a doctorate, to do research in emergency medicine. For all Darvis knew, thousands of patients were about to die with him. That was part of the sacrifice – God only knew what some of the kids lost every year would have gone on to do, the things they would have invented, the laws they would have written, the novels they were going to write, the children they would have had … Not that any of that mattered with West in particular. If it hadn't been the pig man, it would have been an assassin and a bullet.

"Come on, use the cleaver! I've got fifty bucks on scholar third!" Wilson shouted, in the same tone one would use to inform the coach which play they should run, should they hear you through the TV. Instead, the pig-man tried to grab the premed with its awkward, cloven hooves – which would have been comical in any other circumstances. In fact, it was to the jaded Company employees. At a different table, the head of the chemistry department and a cultural advisor giggled and cheered for the scholar to get a temporary reprieve – the chemist had money on scholar fourth and the fool was about to stumble on the scene. It was also odd – Darvis had never known a monster to be this "playful" following the first kill unless they encountered the virgin while the others were still alive. Usually they went straight for the kill, and even if they took their time it was very clear that person was about to die. The whore and the athlete had certainly gotten the cleaver, and the teeth were more than good enough for holding someone in place to inflict it.

And sure enough, the fool, an environmental studies student with a fondness for marijuana by the name of Callaghan, stumbled right into it, somehow having heard nothing of the struggle, while West was reaching for a tire iron that had fallen with a clang from the shelves of the tool shed. The pig-man bolted for Callaghan as soon as he stepped into the tool shed, and the chemist and the cultural advisor cheered while Wilson yelled, "Oh come on!" That was very odd – especially after it had been so hesitant with West. West grabbed the tire iron and the battery he'd come in for in the first place, stumbled to his feet, and bolted for the door, limping on the wounded leg, but making good time all the same. He swung the iron as hard as he could at the back of the pig man's head – and apparently he was stronger than he looked, or else he got a very lucky hit, because the monster went down like glass, falling on top of the now disemboweled Callaghan. West kneeled by Callaghan and took his pulse, but Delta Fourteen A's equipment already knew it was over for the young man – a message indicating he was deceased flashed across the screen. "Shit," Wilson and West both muttered at almost the same time, in about the same tone. West was a pretty cool customer – he'd been surprisingly unfazed by most of this. "Charlie! Charlie! Come on!" West bellowed at the main house, in a tone that said he was not going to wait very long if she did not, in fact, hurry, and glanced around, clearly looking for something he could use to make sure the pig-man stayed down. Failing to find anything, he lifted the iron again and hit the pig-man again and again on the back of the head until he was out of breath, pushing its face further into Callaghan's spilled intestines, sometimes missing and hitting the dead would-be environmentalist instead. By the time he was done, the pig-man's skull was splayed wide open at the back, and the student was covered in blood and gore, both porcine and human. It wasn't getting up – but just wait until the last two saw what Delta Fourteen A had up their sleeves. The little sub-facility had done well for themselves, despite their small size.

"What happened to Todd?" the virgin asked in tears as she stumbled to the toolshed, and then her eyes fell on Callaghan. "Oh … oh my God …" she sobbed, and West shut the door behind him and put her face in his shoulder, patting her back. The helpfulness of which was highly debatable considering he was covered in blood and gore from both their enemy and her fallen friend, but it was sweet nonetheless. Some of the employees had ignored the fact she had a girlfriend and he never had had one in his life to put money on them hooking up before the end. (It highlighted the less-than-literal nature of the "virgin" role that there had been at least one instance of a survivor walking away with something to remember a fallen comrade by arriving thirty-eight weeks later – as long as it didn't happen until after the whore was dead and she otherwise qualified, it seemed to be okay with the Ancient Ones if the virgin got laid before the end. Maybe that kid would cure cancer and they could call that a victory for mankind.) "It's okay. It's okay. It was quick. But we have to go," he said urgently, and broke the embrace to pick up the battery – he never had let go of the tire iron.

"But … but you killed it …" she said in a whimper. "We can take time to take care of …"  
"No Charlie, we need to go now. We need to disappear. Well I do. You should go too … I don't know what they do when it fails …"

"Why? Herbert what …"  
"I wish I could explain, but the point is I don't think this is over and even if it is … it's not for me. We have to go now," he said over his shoulder as he started limping towards the car.

"Let me get those," she said and took the heavy iron and battery, and let him lean on her to make better time towards the truck, hopping awkwardly on the unbitten leg.

"When's the sow getting there?!" Jordan, a techie with a disturbing taste for blood that went beyond the practiced indifference most of them felt, asked eagerly between bites of popcorn.

"I'm sure Delta Fourteen A's on it," Darvis said calmly. All though she was anxious too – it had already been a relatively short night, but spectacular, and she'd hate to think of those two getting away. West would still have to be dealt with and it would mean the other three lives and all the time, money, and effort made to take them had been wasted.

The first thing West did when they reached the car was open it and take Todd's rifle out of the bed of it and load it with the ammunition he'd taken from Todd's room – another reason for Darvis to be nervous they might actually get away. Construction on Fourteen A had been rushed and they hadn't had time to finish the barrier – she'd been assured by the main Delta facility that it would be fine without it, but now she wasn't so sure, especially given the "two birds one stone" nature of this particular sacrifice.

"Jesus, Herbert, you think it's still going to attack?" Charlie asked.

"I don't think there was just one," West answered as he handed it to her. "If something moves, shoot it." He reached back into the bed to grab the jack and set about jacking up the truck to change the (very) flat tire.

"At least let me help with the battery, when you get to that," Charlie said.

"No – you watch my back," he snapped in response as he worked on.

West had the flat tire changed and almost had the new battery in, and Darvis was about to chew some asses at Delta, when he yelped and jumped back, collapsing to the ground, holding his hands out in front of him.

"Shocked yourself, didn't you?" Charlie asked, mimicking his cool tone, but turning around to look at him in concern, kneeling by his side to look and dropping the gun.

And that was all the time the sow needed.

It charged forward, lunging for the girl … the girl? "Is the damn thing defective?!" Darvis asked aloud in a rage as the sow tore the redhead girl's throat out in one swift, brutal bite, spraying both of the remaining humans with blood. The girl's cry of fear turned into a pained gargle and then she collapsed, instantly dead, against West. This time, the grumbles and groaning at headquarters was in unison – they were already overbudget this year, and now one more sacrifice had failed because some damn defective monster had …

Possibly done exactly what it was supposed to do, Darvis thought as she went over the oddities she'd already noted.

The sow was, somehow, even more grotesque than its mate. Unlike him, it wore no bloodstained apron and carried no cleaver, but its teeth and tusks were just as sharp. It had long, tangled, wild brown hair and distressingly human eyes. Its twelve teats were disturbingly human-like – it was disgusting even to Darvis, but the way she heard Wilson and even Jordan groan, it was probably even worse to people who might otherwise enjoy the sight of bare breasts. The sow turned to look at West almost tauntingly, the blood of his only friend in the world dripping from its snout. It made a show of swallowing the flesh it had torn from Charlie's throat, smacking loudly and licking its lips, while he sat there, finally too stunned to move. For just a second.

And then he was reaching for the rifle, fear replaced by anger on his face.

The sow lunged for him, but instead of going for the throat as it had with Charlie it gored him in the side. He cried out in pain but didn't stop, just grabbed the gun and pointed it at the only part he could reach while being gored – the flank – and fired point blank. Blood spattered everywhere and the thing pulled back in pain – West cocked the gun and fired, this time at its head. It was silent, but to be sure, he cocked the gun and fired again, and then again, and then again, and then again, until he ran out of ammunition.

He used a (very small) portion of his shirt that was free of blood to wipe his glasses, which proved ineffectual. He took off his jacket and put it over Charlie's face and upper body. "Bye Charlie," he said softly, and that was the last emotion he showed.

As Darvis screamed at Fourteen A to get damage control into the area to get him immediately, he slammed the hood closed, put the rifle and the other pack of ammunition in the passenger seat, and tried the truck. It worked – the battery had been installed correctly, even if cost him a nasty burn to get it done. He put the pick-up in gear and backed up, away from Charlie and the dead sow, and all too likely towards freedom. Fourteen A didn't have anyone qualified to deal with an actual human in the area – the pig wranglers probably could have tried but considering he was armed and had a car they weren't likely to succeed and she told them not to bother. Instead she chewed them for not having them on hand considering the lack of perimeter field, all while being furious over the fact that neither bird had been killed with this stone.

Or had it?

"We'll gear up at the main facility for one last try, we've got everything in place but the final invitation," the director of Delta facility said through the phone. Following the debacle, Darvis had retreated to her office to make all the important phone calls. The director had refused to apologize – insisting the defect with the sow was unforeseeable, and she had a point. Everything else had gone perfectly – it was hard to fault Delta staff for something that had never happened before.  
"Hold off on that – at least for the moment," Darvis said, on a hunch.

"Darvis – are you crazy? Everyone's going into their last ditch efforts, we can't afford to hesitate if any of them …"

"I didn't say wait that long – set things in motion in twenty-four hours if you don't hear from me," Darvis snapped and hung up.

She remembered what Brody had always said when she had worked directly under him. "Always trust downstairs." That was the motto of everyone in a position of power in the Company, but Brody had believed it more than anyone. He was the only Director of Operations anyone could remember who had actually been _excited_ when mysterious directives showed up in facility computers or something freaky happened like with the dream demons.

Darvis hung up the phone and allowed herself to think it through for the first time. West was almost certainly a literal virgin, if their research on him was at all reliable, and it always was. He'd had multiple plans to get them out, most of them only foiled because of stage hands working against them behind the scenes, and been the originator of the plan that allowed him to escape and would have gotten Charlie out if they hadn't been surprised by the sow. He wasn't as caring as the girls who usually filled the role, to say the least, but no one said that was a hard requirement. He was a slight, darkheaded, conventionally attractive kid who didn't drink or smoke and passed up Callaghan's offer of a joint – which even Charlie had taken. And Charlie, in addition to that joint, was definitely not a literal virgin unless girl-on-girl didn't count for some reason – Darvis was fairly certain their investigators were still passing around the polaroids of her and her girlfriend – and she'd been too frightened to help much. But she was just as smart as West – also a premed, also having dabbled in research, also an honor student. They'd had female scholars before – but had they ever had a male virgin? That was her next call – to archives.

"Johnson," she snapped into the phone.

"I heard what happened – what can we do to help?" Johnson asked. Everyone in the Company got nervous when they had to go into the last stretch before they had a successful sacrifice – it meant they were cutting it close, and also that a lot of kids had died and potentially attracted outside attention.

"Look at all records for Delta and Belta – has there ever been a male virgin or whore? And have someone in linguistics answer this question: Are the instructions in any of the original agreements gender specific?"

"I'll get everyone on it, ma'am."

"Thank you."

And then she called the directors of Gamma, Beta, and Alpha – Alpha had already started so she let them proceed, but she put Gamma and Beta on a brief hold. The directors of the latter two reacted much as Delta had – they thought it was a sign of weakness. But even setting aside the lives at stake, there was also the cost and the attention to be considered – the second lesson Brody had taught her was not to be needlessly bloodthirsty. Callous, yes – you couldn't shed a tear for the kids, no matter what, or you'd go completely to pieces and morale would suffer. But you couldn't enjoy it either – even if you pretended to, for the sake of the underlings.

Within an hour, Johnson called back – the linguists had confirmed all the original agreements were gender neutral, but they were still searching for precedent.

Four hours after that, one more phone call told Darvis what she was hoping to hear. "1937 in Europe was all male, and it was the only one that succeeded that year. I think it's safe to say – we can call this season to a close."

Now there was just the small matter of dealing with West, but it could wait – wherever he turned up, they could have someone deal with him quietly.

Darvis went to her modest home in a nice neighborhood to sleep for the first time in days – coffee was always the only thing keeping her up during sacrifice season.

She slept easily, knowing Earth was safe another year and fifteen kids had been spared the ritual – it wasn't a great year, but better than the year before. She got to sleep a little bit after dawn – she could hear the little neighbor kids playing. Safe another year – that made it all worth it.

Well, she slept easily until …

" _They don't want you to kill the boy," the man standing at the edge of her bed said._

" _Who the hell are you?" she demanded, pulling the sheet over her chest as she sat up. Had she not been terrified, she might have regretted deciding to sleep nude._

" _You don't recognize me? I'm hurt," the man, a fairly ordinary but inexplicably creepy looking fellow, said in a voice full of mock hurt, and then as Darvis watched his face burned and melted away until she recognized the charred corpse currently housed at Delta Facility._

" _How did you get out of containment?" she demanded._

 _The man's face … unburned, for lack of a better word … until he achieved a state of having a horribly melted face but was still recognizably human. "It would appear that your little fields went on the fritz," the man answered gleefully, playing with the …_

 _The knives she had somehow managed not to notice on his hand. "And they say you can't take it with you!" he said and raised his hand, folding his fingers up and down one by one as he examined them for himself. She cowered back into her bed, pulling the sheets over her head instinctively like a small child. "Really? Not even a little fun? I bet it wouldn't even hurt for real …" She peeked hesitantly over the top of the sheets, and saw the burned man looking up and arguing with someone. "She's too old for my tastes anyway," he said with a scoff, then looked back down at her. "Anyway – they say they don't want you to kill the boy."_

"They _?" Darvis asked, her skin crawling, even though she already knew._

" ' _Downstairs,' " the burned man said with an evil grin. "They said the computer would be too slow since most everyone went home … so they let me out." And then, he lunged forward with those knives …_

And Darvis woke up with a start before the knives could hit – even in sleep, she hadn't particularly wanted to find out what he meant by not being able to hurt her "for real." But terror didn't stop her from performing her duty. She reached for the phone by her bed and quickly dialed Delta Facility.

"Did containment unit 14572 just go off?" she asked as soon as someone answered, without bothering with the niceties.

"We were about to call – in fact it turned off and then on again," a man, probably Sitterson by the sound of it, answered in a flustered voice.

"Very good. Don't worry about it. Downstairs just found a new way to reach out," she said wearily, and hung up. She certainly hoped they didn't do it often. The next call was to someone in external threat management.

"Director Darvis!" some butt kisser said enthusiastically. Much more enthusiastically then was needed, especially at this hour and given what had just happened. "It's good to hear from you. We have an update on West – it looks like he's getting stitched up in the ER now, using a fake insurance card he got off some poor schmoe, we can have an officer pick him up and …"  
"Let him go."  
"Excuse me?"  
"I just got word from downstairs. Keep track of him but let him go, let him think he's gotten away. Downstairs has something in mind for him."  
"But ma'am …"  
"Never question downstairs," she said authoritatively and hung up without getting the operator's name – if they knew what was good for them they'd pass it on to their superiors and that would be the end of it.

* * *

 **1983**

After working all night and well into the next day, pulling the kind of all-nighter he hadn't since he was working that horrible triple homicide a few years before he retired, Frank Hernandez had used an atlas to find every town where the local PD or Sherrif's department had responded to a survivor or investigated a mysterious disappearance matching the pattern. They were pretty spread out, literally all over the country, but they seemed, oddly, to converge on a single point in the Midwest – as though that were where the pebble dropped into the pond and everything else spread out from it in a ripple, but with a few outliers in distant places like Texas, California, and Florida. And in one case, Mexico – though that was easily the most distant one.

Well, that was a starting place to be sure.

* * *

 **Author's Note**

And if the sacrifice West was in was a movie, you know the last shot would be panning to the litter of piglets in the bushes or something.

One of my favorite things about writing this was that it's a period piece. It was such a fun challenge to think about how both Marta and Frank would have done research on these cases before the Internet … today that would be only a google search away, but for them it involves a lot more leg work and even then they're only scratching the surface. Like with Internet they might find out there's a separate but equally weirdly specific pattern for Asia and South America / Mexico and a similar one in Europe, and eventually find a similar geographical pattern for the others (and realize that Marta's was part of the Gamma pattern) – but instead he's pretty much limited to the US and his case which happened to US citizens in Mexico.

I don't think anyone is following this but just in case they are - I'm afraid I'm nowhere near being able to meet my original Halloween goal. I wish I'd had the idea earlier in the summer so I could have had it done ad ready to post, but oh well. This way I can take my time and make sure I do it justice. I will be finishing it eventually but for right now I need to put it on hold to finish some other projects in a timely manner that have been waiting for resolution for a lot longer. See my profile for more details about when you can expect to see more of this story.


	5. Chapter 4: The Feds

Chapter 4

The Feds

Author's Note: I'm baaaack! So this year I'm going to proceed with the original plan of getting this out over the course of October and finishing up on Halloween or the Day of the Dead. I wanted to post this on Friday the thirteenth but sadly I missed most of the world on that – oh well, it's still Friday the thirteenth in Hawaii I'm sure. If I fail to meet the Halloween _dead_ line (teehee) I'll continue posting at a rate of (hopefully) a chapter a month.

I don't want to put it on the specific chapter to avoid spoilers but sexual trauma survivors or suicide attempt survivors should be aware there will be a chapter that may be triggering – I always try not to be too lurid with such things and given one of the films that inspired this fic I imagine most of the fandom has seen worse, but even so I like to put out the warning.

I'm always very visual in planning out my stories, but with this one even moreso than usual. I considered doing it in screenplay format and may rework it as such at some point in the future (obviously for a different site since fanfiction does not allow scripts) but decided to write in prose form first since I have more experience with prose. As such I'm experimenting with ways to convey visual elements of film such as montage in prose form. Will it go horribly or splendidly or something in between? Guess we'll see.

* * *

For the life of her, Edith couldn't imagine why they were dredging the lake for the poor little Voorhees boy now. It had been so long – and nothing had been found all those decades ago when it happened. She hadn't believed it when Tom told her. His grandson Keith had stumbled on some men with heavy equipment in the woods, and when he asked them what they were doing they told him they were looking for a little boy who'd been drowned. No one had been up there since the horrible incident a few years ago – and they'd been the first people up there in decades – so there was only one little boy they could be looking for. Even Tom seemed to have thought Keith was pulling his leg.

But then, one day, they came to the diner. Two of them anyway. Strangers were such an unusual sight, the locals couldn't help but file in to discreetly stare at the passersby. Or at least they assumed they were passersby. They were a heavy, rough sort – obviously people who worked with their hands. "What brings you here?" she asked as she brought them coffee.

"We're just here doing some work up at Camp Crystal Lake," one of them said casually.

You could have heard a pin drop in the diner. "What kind of work?" Edith asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer.

"We were hoping to find a little boy who drowned years ago – a relative paid us to go out and look for him." What relatives had that poor boy had besides his mother, now dead herself? Maybe his father's family had finally grown a conscience and decided to help find the little boy whose existence they had ignored. Times were different now, after all – people didn't hide away their addled relatives anymore.

"I hope you find him," she said without elaboration, and set the coffee down, doing a poor job of hiding her nerves. There was something evil about that place, and while part of her wanted the little boy to be found and rest in peace, after all these years, there was a part of her that thought they ought to just leave well enough alone.

* * *

The phone rang three times, four times. Frank was getting ready to leave a message when there was finally an answer.

"Lou Vasquez speaking," the gruff voice of Frank's partner from long ago said.

"Hey Vasquez, it's Frank."

"Hernandez? I thought you dropped off the face of the Earth," Vasquez said jocularly.

"Nah, I just retired. You're the one that got Shanghaied by the feds," Frank answered in kind.

"So how are you doing Hernandez? You finally get a lady to help clean up that toxic waste dump of a bachelor pad?" Frank glanced around at his apartment, which was in serious disarray, not the least of which involved plates and mugs in need of washing that had a tendency to accumulate on the coffee table until well after Frank had run out of clean dishes and been forced to become resourceful.

"Afraid not, how's your ball and chain?" he asked in turn. And so the small talk went on and on for a bit – and then Frank broached the subject he'd called about.

"So … I've been looking into something for a gentleman who lost his daughter …"  
"So you went the private investigator route after all? And here I thought you were too lazy to pull that off," Vasquez teased. He'd always been on Frank's case about his apparent lack of ambition – once Frank had become a detective, he hadn't really cared to advance too much further in the ranks. He'd never had ambitions of becoming a police chief or joining the feds the way his former partner had. He just wanted to solve crimes in his hometown, do some good in the world, and retire when he reached the right age – the fact he was even looking at this was shocking to him. He could guarantee he wouldn't be if it weren't a local girl involved.

"Nah – just looking into something for a nice family. Did you ever hear …" he suddenly hesitated. He knew exactly how crazy all of that stuff sounded. He'd have to start slow – the last thing he wanted was for Vasquez not to take him seriously. But that was all the more reason to ask about the case in question. "Did you ever hear about the case in Mexico where five kids from Katy went missing, with tons of blood left behind, and one survivor who came back spouting nonsense?"

"I can't say I did," Vasquez said, which was actually a good sign. "You have a lead?"  
"Possibly – but I think it's big. Spread out, I mean. I think it's going to require the feds."

"Well if it's something only happening in Mexico …"  
"It's not. I think it's happening all over the US – I've got cases of weird disappearances with similar groups of victims in multiple states."

"Groups? That's starting to sound a little weird, Hernandez …"

 _You have no idea._ "Believe me, I know. Usually five kids – high school or college age – sometimes a couple more."

"So what are you thinking – white slavery?"

"Maybe – or maybe ritual murders," Hernandez offered cautiously.  
"Oh my God – you're not some small town cop, Hernandez, please tell me you haven't fallen for this Satanic ritual stuff!"  
"Trust me, I know how goofy this sounds. I wouldn't even bring it up but I don't know what else to think here – we're looking at an alarmingly specific pattern here."

Vasquez actually laughed. It was a short, gravelly laugh, but still. "How much you getting paid for this wild goose chase, Hernandez?"  
"What I was making on the force." The line was quiet a long time – Vasquez must have realized Frank wasn't going to move mountains unless there was something to it for that kind of money.

"I assume you've got a case file put together?" Vasquez asked flatly.  
"You know it."  
"Can you fax it over to me?"  
"Gotta have a number for it."

"Well get a pen and paper out you lazy idiot."

* * *

The autoclaves on the third floor were the worst.

Herbert was hardly the easily rattled sort, but from the very first time the autoclaves on the fourth floor were full and he'd had to cart the neatly wrapped surgical tools in need of sterilization to the ones on the floor below he'd gained a subtle but undeniable aversion to the place. Unlike the autoclave on his floor that was a piece of standalone equipment in a small room, or even the tiny ones he had used in Boston that had to be hand filled, the autoclaves on the third floor were built into the wall of a cavernous room that put him in mind of the crematorium at his grandfather's funeral home. The only other equipment in the room was a massive dishwasher for cleaning glassware that didn't need to be cleansed with hydrochloric acid and a small sink and counter on which to set items to prepare them for either dishwasher or autoclave. At least three hundred square feet of the room were wide open, inexplicably, which induced some kind of odd sense of reverse claustrophobia whenever Herbert stepped into it. Everything echoed in that room. He was always glad to get the steam sterilization cycle going and leave. Were he a less fastidious person, he might have been prone to "forget" he'd started the cycle and leave it longer than he should have.

Once more, he wheeled two loads of surgical tools into the elevator and down to the third floor. It was quiet – was it a holiday Herbert had forgotten about? Possibly.

He turned the key in the room and found it empty. He didn't hear the mechanical groaning or hiss of steam from either – good. He probably needed both for today. He went to the logbook which sat on the counter by the sink and noted the time. He was the only one to use it so far today. He opened the massive steel doors to the one on the right, somewhat closer to the door, which was on the opposite wall from the ovens and pulled the basket from the chamber.

He wasn't going to be able to load all of the tools into one oven, so he dutifully loaded about half onto the basket. He might as well start it before loading the other and somewhat stagger the task of retrieving the tools later. He pushed the basket along the tracks back into the chamber – and heard the clattering sound of something falling. Herbert cursed a little under his breath and rolled the basket back out and took the trays of tools off. He couldn't imagine how whatever had fallen had managed to fall from the trays – they weren't at all over-stacked – but that did nothing to change the necessity of retrieving it. At least the autoclaves hadn't been used today so they would be cool to the touch and he could climb in right away.

He peered in and saw something glistening in the very back. How in the hell had that even happened? The basket hadn't even gotten in that far. Maybe the instrument had bounced? He had no choice but to go crawling in despite the numerous posted safety warnings and his own trepidation. He pulled the basket all the way out onto the part of the tracks that disconnected – getting it all back together to put it back in would be a nuisance but couldn't be helped – and disconnected and wheeled the thing out of the way.

Even after touching the inside with the back of his hand to ensure himself it was cool enough, it took Herbert a moment to steel his nerves enough to crawl in.

The damn thing seemed to have gotten even bigger since Herbert decided to crawl in – he could have sworn it was not quite as long as his body and he should have been able to reach the fallen instrument easily. Instead, he was entirely in the cursed thing and still had to slide himself a bit further back to reach it.

As soon as he did so, he heard the ominous creak of the door closing and closing fast …

Herbert woke, safe in his own bed, with the slam of the door and the click of the locking mechanism. Even though he woke before things even got hot in the nightmare, he was drenched in sweat. At least he didn't cry out this time.

He put both hands to his face and groaned – not again. Not again.

He was having nightmares every night – he hadn't since the first two months after the incident in Texas. And before then, not since he was a child – when Mother died.

It was just the stress, that was all – he had a committee meeting coming up and those were never exactly enjoyable. Few of the other faculty members understood Herr Gruber's vision and none of them liked Herbert as a person and, even though he was mostly fluent, defending in German was immensely stressful. He knew he wasn't as articulate or expressive in German as he was in English and he stumbled over technical terms and the more he heard the uncertainty and mistakes in his own voice the more frustrated and surly he got – he knew he'd gotten himself into it by choosing to study abroad but he still resented it.

Not that he would have had a choice – not after crossing the Company. He'd wanted to study here ever since he read about Dr. Gruber's work as a senior in high school – but any chance he'd had to back out of it was destroyed when he opened that file.

Psychology was the softest of sciences (well maybe not as soft as sociology), but now and then it produced some wisdom of note – one of these was that people often felt less stressed in a given situation as soon as they knew they could leave it, even if that was the only factor to change. A gilded cage is still a cage, and all of that.

That had to be it. The acute stress of the coming committee meeting and, more broadly, the vaguely claustrophobic feeling that had permeated Herbert's life since the day he'd fled with a fake passport – that was why he was having these nightmares.

And he was definitely imagining that his palms smelled of the rust and smoke of the inside of an autoclave.

* * *

It didn't take Lou very long to realize Hernandez was onto something – as surreal as it was. And there was definitely a case for federal action – his first priority was to talk to survivors that had been convicted, probably wrongly, to see what, if anything they remembered – they'd have the most motive to talk, which was both a pro and a con. They might say something true the survivors who had never faced legal action were afraid to – but they might also make something up out of desperation. But the three imprisoned survivors that they knew about were his first stop – then he would go talk to some of the others. Hernandez was interviewing some by phone but Lou preferred to speak to as many in person as he could.

Which meant a lot of trips to various places, much to his wife's chagrin.

The first up was Maya Lawrence – a twenty-nine-year-old woman who had been in lock-up in Taycheedah Correctional Facility in Wisconsin for eight years after the apparent murder of her friends. Lou was shocked the jury had convicted on such flimsy … no, nonexistent evidence – but then in a little town like the town where the alleged murders had occurred, maybe it wasn't that surprising.

The second up was Annie Thompkins – a twenty-three-year-old woman who had been in the secure wing of a mental hospital for seven years on similar barely existent evidence in Chicago (the crime and the trial had taken part in a rural part of Illinois).

The third was Tammy Peters – a young woman residing under house arrest in Dayton, Ohio while appealing a conviction for a crime that had allegedly occurred in 1978. If her appeal failed, she'd be sent to prison.

It was pouring rain when Lou pulled up at Taycheedah in a rental car (he got the best he could get on company money, of course – a sexy little red sports car his wife would definitely not have approved of). He'd already made all the arrangements of course – but he still had to sign in. He went through the formality of flashing his badge and signing the paperwork, then followed a guard through the prison into an interview room. He was separated from Maya by a glass wall – of course she had been convicted of killing four people and disposing of the bodies so well they were never found. The girl behind the glass didn't look capable of such a thing – she was a tiny, mousy girl, pale with curly dark hair and wide brown eyes. She just looked so defeated too – that was another way she didn't look capable of it. Over the years Lou had become very adept at judging people right away – he'd had an opportunity to meet Ted Bundy, and he'd immediately seen darkness in his eyes. Even if he hadn't known what he did, he didn't think he'd have trusted him. This girl didn't look dangerous – she just looked defeated. "Hi Maya, I'm Agent Vasquez."  
"They told me you were coming," she said, not quite looking him in the eye. Her voice was flat and lifeless, and she spoke so softly into the phone that he barely heard her. "They said you had questions about … when all my friends died."

"I do, Maya – I think what happened to your friends may be part of a broader pattern …" she cringed, assuming he meant she was being accused of yet more things. "If they are – I believe you've been wrongfully imprisoned," he clarified. She looked up at him in shock.

It was cold and dreary – unseasonably cold, even for this godforsaken city – in Chicago on the day he interviewed Annie. The hospital was a decent looking place, at least – even the secure wing was well cleaned and the staff's voices were soft. Lou had been in a few mental hospitals and this was the first one that didn't make his skin crawl. A doctor met with him when he signed in. "Agent Vasquez, I presume?" a professional looking woman in a pants suit asked and extended her hand.

"It is indeed, ma'am," he answered.

"I'm Dr. Lewis. Thank you for coming. I'm glad you're interested in Annie's case – I have a lot of questions about how the incident happened myself."  
"You do, ma'am?"  
"Yes – let's walk," she said. She led him through a set of double doors into a long hallway with locked cells with small windows. Lou glanced inside as they passed, and saw the rooms were heavily padded. Most of them were empty, though some held patients in varying states of distress. "We don't like to keep patients here – only when they are at the highest danger of injuring themselves," Dr. Lewis explained. She lowered her voice. "Some days I am not sure Annie did it. Oh I know the police said the evidence was overwhelming, but … I'd put it down to denial and/or hallucinations, but Annie doesn't seem to have any ongoing hallucinations – she never complains of the 'goblins' here in the hospital, or anything else out of the ordinary. I suspect that if she did do the murders, it was only under the influence of powerful drugs – LSD or the like. But the police won't release her blood tests from directly after the incident – it's all very suspicious." Lou was taken aback by the openness of the doctor in this regard – but then he supposed he shouldn't be. And this was the first he'd heard about police resistance to releasing blood tests – that was an angle he had to tackle. He should let Hernandez know – his girl had been hospitalized too.

"Annie – Annie is safe in her room most days. We've petitioned to have her moved to a lower security wing," Dr. Lewis explained when they came to stand outside one of the padded cells. Her voice sounded weary. "But when she heard someone was coming to discuss what happened to her friends she – became violent. She is very suspicious of anyone asking about the incident – it's hard to blame her after what she went through. Usually I tell her visitors to avoid asking about the incident, but … in this case, there wouldn't be a point otherwise. Just don't become confrontational – tell her you believe her, even if it's a lie."  
"I was going to do that anyway. I think there's a conspiracy at work."

"No, I mean about everything, even the goblins. Tell her you want to stop the goblins."  
"Aren't you people supposed to break delusions?"  
"We can only do that from a place of trust – right now, Annie trusts very few people." She opened the cell and Frank stepped inside.

Annie was a pretty redhead – stunning, in fact, even with her short hair unkempt and no makeup to speak of and her eyes red from crying. She sat in the corner, with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, bearing the marks of scuffles with orderlies in the form of minor bruises and scratches. Her eyes were wild and dark, and when she saw Lou, in his nice suit, she made a sound of fright and scurried into the opposite corner, trying to get away from him. "I believe you Annie," Lou said, as softly as he could and still be heard, and held out his hands in an open sort of gesture. She looked at him doubtfully. "I believe someone … set the monsters after you," he said. Which was a good way to put it – he truthfully believed someone had drugged her and then taken out her friends, or watched her do it for whatever twisted reason. He may not believe in the monsters, but he definitely believed she had seen them. And that monsters of a different sort were behind the whole thing. "And I'm here to ask what you remember – maybe you can tell me something that will help me figure out who this is, so that I can stop from setting monsters loose on anyone else."

After a long moment, she nodded.

It was a bright, sunny spring day in Dayton, but with a few dark clouds far away on the horizon. Lou knocked on a bright red door adorned with a cute flower wreath with pastel eggs woven into it – someone was excited for Easter despite her situation.

A smiling brunette answered the door. She was well dressed and slight – her ankle bracelet stood out like a sore thumb. Her smile disappeared as soon as she saw him. "Oh, Agent Vasquez. I'm so glad you made it," she said and put on a smile but she wasn't good at faking it.

"I believe you," he said, before even stepping in the door, having learned how important that three word phrase was from his first two interviewees.

"You really believe me?" Maya asked. Life had entered into her voice again like a balloon that had been re-inflated.

"What happened to you and your friends matches a nationwide pattern," he said, careful to choose his words. He didn't want to incur any kind of liability or give her false hope.

"… There are others?" she asked softly.

"There's a pattern," he repeated noncommittally.

"What kind of pattern?" she asked, her eyes wild. It was almost a relief to see life in them, but the wildness was unsettling. Internally, Lou held a quick debate about how much detail to reveal.

"Groups of young people disappearing under mysterious circumstances. I'm hoping that you can shed light on this situation."

"I'll do whatever I can," she answered eagerly.

"Annie, why did your friends go so far away for spring break?" Lou asked. He'd long since decided to sit – it was the easiest way to speak with the young woman and look her in the eye – or as much as she'd allow. He was worried about ever getting back up again but in the meantime this was most comfortable.

"That sounds like an accusation."

"It's just a question – I need to know how the … people handling the goblins are getting people to remote locations."

"It was stupid. Joe had a coupon for a free night at some random cabin in the woods," Tammy answered, then sipped from the cup of tea she'd brewed.

"A coupon? Do you remember how he got that?"  
"I … Oh if I'd ever thought that might be important! He'd gotten it in the mail I think."

"At his parents' house? At the dorm?"  
"He lived in the dorm so I assume that, but I'm not sure," Tammy lamented. "Damn it! If I'd known any of that was going to be important … I've kicked myself ever since … ever since that night."

"It's all right – you couldn't have anticipated what would happen," Lou assured.

"The house was always weird," Maya explained. She was looking down again, but this time the distance in her eyes seemed to come from vivid memory rather than general despondence. "There were stories, you know – about who it belonged to and whether or not it was haunted. No one seemed to know for sure – there were all kinds of rumors, but they all contradicted each other. We dared each other to run up there and ring the doorbell – we just decided, you know, it would be good spooky fun to stay the night there …"

"Donna's sister told her about it – said there was a place we could go and have some privacy," Annie said to her hands folded in front of her.

"How did Donna's sister know about it, do you know?"

"I don't," Annie said. Lou made a quick note – if Donna's sister would be willing to speak to him, maybe she would remember.

Tammy's tea and Lou's coffee were no longer steaming – so far they'd covered familiar ground, but Lou was hopeful he could tease out another lead from "It was … so weird. There was a basement with all kinds of stuff strewn about," Tammy exposited. Lou's interest piqued – Annie and Maya had mentioned nothing of the kind.

"What kind of stuff?"

"Weird stuff – ancient looking stuff. A book with weird writing on it that looked like it was bound in some kind of skin, a beat up metal ring with an Asian script, and the locket … we picked up the locket. It had a picture of this little girl in it – this sad looking little girl. She was so cute but it was kind of a spooky picture – all black and white and she looked so haunted … Then we heard Laura screaming and ran upstairs …" She shuddered and, for a long while, was especially interested in her dwindling tea. "We found other stuff later, throughout the house – old newspapers and photo albums and stuff that we could piece together something about the little girl – that the cabin had been an orphanage of horrors. There was this horrible old woman who ran it, and she beat the children for the slightest infraction and did worse things to them – made them stand in place for hours and chained them to walls, even cut a little boy's fingers off for stealing. One day the older kids killed her and buried her body in the basement and … I know it sounds crazy but she was still there, and so were all the children that had died under the old hag's care. She made the children do bad things to us and did some of it herself … At least some of the newspapers and things were suddenly in places it hadn't been before – like the children wanted us to know what happened and put it where we would notice. I … I think I gave them some peace, in the end. That's … the only comfort I have." Lou almost didn't want to take it away from her – didn't want to explain it was probably all a drug-induced hallucination, and perhaps the things were put there by conspirators as part of the ritual. "Did you ever see this little girl or any of the other children putting things there?" he asked. It was such an odd question – he wasn't sure it made any difference since even if she'd seen someone else put it there she might not remember it that way because of the drugs.

"No but – how else do you explain that?"

"I'm not sure," he lied for the time being.

Maya twirled the cord of the phone in her hands. They had gone over every gory detail of the night in question, and they were almost out of time, but Maya seemed to still have something to share. "I never stop thinking I should have died that night," she admitted in a voice that was barely audible. It wasn't an uncommon sentiment for survivors, nor a feeling that was entirely alien to him, but Lou never had learned the most graceful way to respond.

"But you're here. And you can help me find the people responsible for what happened to them."

"Maybe I'd feel better if I could." She was silent a long time, and just when Lou was about to prompt her to say something with another question, she spoke once more. "We should have listened to Mrs. Winters."

"I'm sorry?"  
"Mrs. Winters. She's … it's not very generous, but she's sort of considered the town crazy lady. We were in the convenience store buying sodas and junk food for the night at the old house, and she came in to get some beer. She … She looked right at us, and she told us not to go up there, that we should just let the house be. She knew we were going to the old house even though we hadn't told anyone. We were spooked, but we went anyway … Oh God I wish we hadn't. I don't know if she knew somehow – I never believed in psychics or anything, but after what we saw in that house I'll believe anything. She must have had a vision or something, maybe just a bad feeling – or maybe she was making shit up and happened to be right, I don't care. But we should have listened. It's still printed on my eyes, just like the walls of blood and Tim's mangled body, the sight of her standing there, pointing us with one gnarled finger and this wild look in her eyes. I can hear every word she said, like it was yesterday." Maya grew more visibly agitated with every passing second as she spoke. And Lou understood that – he'd been in Vietnam, he'd lost some of his buddies. There were moments he couldn't help but return to time and again, desperately wishing he had time to do something else, anything else, to maybe not leave them lying there in the mud.

"I know," was all he managed to say in solidarity. "What was this lady's name again?"  
"Mrs. Winters … I think her first name is something like Annabelle … I don't even know if she's still alive." Frank sure hoped she was.

"What exactly did she say?"  
"She said, 'You shouldn't go to the house on Gentry hill. Don't deny that that's where you're going. You should leave the evil in that place to itself, if you don't have a death wish.' She spoke with so much certainty. Then she looked at me, and she told me, me specifically, 'You'll live to regret it if you go there.' It's like she knew I was going to be the one who survived – how could she have known that?!" That's what Lou was hoping to find out.

After several cups of tea for Tammy and several cups of coffee for Lou, it was clear Tammy had shared every single detail of that night that she possibly could. Tammy thanked him for coming and saw him out, as politely as though they'd been discussing vacuum sales. "Now I don't know what my investigation will turn up, if it'll be any help …" Lou started to explain as he got his coat.  
"That's all right, nothing else has been," Tammy replied with a shrug and opened the front door. "I hope you have a nice flight back to Washington!" A shiver ran up Lou's spine.

Annie had started to go in circles, and Lou knew he had all the information he could get from her. Dr. Lewis saw it too. "I think it's time for you to get some rest Annie," she said. To Lou's surprise, she didn't resist, only nodded and turned to Lou.

"It was nice to meet you," she said and held out a hand. Lou shook it.

"It was nice meeting you too, Annie."

"Please get the people who gave us to the goblins, please," Annie pleaded as she walked away, led by Dr. Lewis. The certainty and urgency in her voice were childlike.

"I'll do what I can, Annie," Lou promised in his gentlest voice.

The revelation about the little old lady came just in time – a brown-clad officer reminded Frank his time with Maya was almost up, in far louder a tone than was needed. "Do you think you can prove that that lunatic killed my friends?" Maya asked, her voice mostly flat but she couldn't keep a hint of hope out of it. Lou was taken off-guard – but now he realized he should have expected it. Maya believed with all her heart in whatever she had seen under the influence of drugs and terror. Of course she thought, when he said he was investigating her case, that when he said there was a broader pattern he was sifting through like an FBI agent investigating a serial killer.

"I can't say anything at this point, Maya …"

She practically lunged into the plexiglass, leaning so close to it that her face almost touched the divider between them. The guard behind Lou stepped forward, a hand on his gun, but she didn't step back. And he was bluffing anyway – there was no way she was coming through that glass.  
"Please, you've got to prove it, don't you understand? That maniac is still out there, he could be killing again, he could do this to God knows how many other people …" The desperation in her voice was palpable.

"I'll look into it," Lou promised, it was all he could do. A guard on the other side of the glass stepped forward.  
"Promise me you'll get him, Agent Vasquez, promise me! Promise you'll get me out of here." Lou couldn't – he'd promised a woman he'd find her son's killer once, and he hadn't kept it, and that was the hardest way to learn to never make promises. But "I'll do my best," sounded so feeble in the face of Maya's desperation. So he deflected.

"Thank you for your help, Maya, you've given me an excellent jumping off point. Thank you for agreeing to meet with me." He didn't say 'have a good day' as he normally would have because, well, it was a prison.

He walked away, refusing to look back as the guard practically dragged Maya back to her cell.

* * *

On the rare occasion there were no customers to wait on, there was always scut work. Cleaning, obviously, and also portioning frozen food from the bulk in which they were received into the portions prepared for meals. This was a slow day in terms of customer service – which meant there was a lot of portioning to do. Marta was hard at work in the back, portioning fries and often sticking her head out to see if anyone was up front.

She'd felt uneasy ever since the investigation started – she ought to feel better, since there was finally someone with some investigative skill who believed her, and there was a possibility, however small, that there would finally be some closure for what had happened. But she couldn't help but feel that a can of worms was about to be opened, and she'd gone through the last week constantly feeling a little sick to her stomach with her heart beating a little faster than it usually did. Which is probably why, when she glanced around the corner and saw a man standing at the counter, she couldn't help but jump. But the man stood there, looking somewhat impatient. He was a rough-looking man with short black hair, wearing a somewhat greasy shirt and work pants. She put on a smile and greeted him with a, "Sorry about that, I was just packaging some French fries, what can I get for you?" while she walked to the cash register at the counter. The man's sour look disappeared instantly, replayed by a smile that was not quite smarmy. She hoped he wasn't one of the creepy ones – sometimes she got hit on, even wearing an oversized T-shirt with the bowling alley's logo on it and her rattiest pair of jeans, both of which smelled like grease and smoke, and wasn't wearing make-up. She was convinced literally nothing would stop creepy older guys from hitting on girls who had to smile and wait on them no matter what they said.

"Oh I don't know just yet – what do you have that's good?" he asked, in the thickest Texan accent Marta had ever heard outside of movies.

"Well, I think the burgers are pretty good. Personally I prefer the cheese sticks to the fries – but if you'd like to try a lot of different things, we have a sampler …"

"Do you have anything like a fish sandwich?" Marta tried not to cringe, and didn't quite succeed. "Not a big fan of fish huh?"  
"Um no … I'm afraid not. I mean, I'm afraid we don't' have anything like that."  
"Ah darn, I was really in the mood for it. There's just … something fishy in the air, you know?" There was nothing sinister in the words, but it was a bizarre thing to say, and there was a glint, just a glint, of something malevolent in the man's eyes for just a moment.

Marta cleared her throat and kept her composure, even though her heart was racing and she felt kind of sick. _Now I'm just being a paranoid lunatic,_ she berated herself. "Yeah, I guess so," she said with the fake but convincing smile she had learned from years of working at this snack bar.

"Do I know you from somewhere?" the man asked, and the way he was studying her was doing nothing to make her anxiety subside.

"I don't think so," she said weakly.

"No I'm sure of it – you were the girl that went down to Mexico with her friends and the only …"  
"I don't want to talk about that." He smiled – it wasn't a nice smile.

"I'm sure you don't. Now how about you put in my order for a cheeseburger with no onions and some of those cheese sticks you mentioned, and a can of Coors?"

"Uh … of course," Marta stammered, and sketched the order down on a notepad and keyed the amount into the cash register. "That'll be four twenty-five." He fished in his pocket for his wallet, and laid a five dollar bill on the table. Marta put the five in and took out his change, avoiding looking him in the eye and longing for the moment she could take the ticket to the cook and go back to portioning fries in the back. She slid open the large cooler behind the counter and fished around for a can of Coors, very aware of his eyes on her back the entire time. "Here's your change – you're number forty-two," she said with a cheerful smile and a steady voice and slid him the Coors and three quarters.

When the food was ready, Marta left it on the corner and called the number forty-two over the sound system and then returned to the back instead of making an effort to take the man his food in person like she usually did.

The whole rest of the night, Marta was on edge even more than she had been the last few days. She'd been recognized now and again, but usually she just got condolences. There was something sinister about incident – nothing she could put into words, nothing he had said was outright malicious, but she couldn't stop thinking over the look in his eyes and the little sneer he gave her as she waited on the one or two other customers of the night, portioned just about everything in the freezer, then finally, mercifully, cleaned up and counted the money for close at the end of her shift. She thought about asking the cook or her boss to walk her to her car, but decided against it.

Her car was parked on the side of the bowling alley, on the side that wasn't lit very well. The walk to the car seemed to stretch on and on, even though Marta was walking quickly with her keys in her hand, instead of shuffling to the car tiredly as she usually did.

The car was unlocked. Marta's heart almost stopped – she didn't want to open the door, but she knew she had to. She smelled it as soon as she opened the door. A sickly, pungent smell with just a bit of salt. And she heard it too – the buzzing of flies. She quickly clicked on the dome light to see if it was what she thought it was, and immediately regretted it.

A rotten, scaley webbed hand, with a sickening cloud of black flies swarming over it, was lying on the passenger seat.

She was back in the bowling alley without being aware of it. "Are you okay, Marta? You look like you've seen a ghost," her boss, John, asked.

"I …" Marta started. She realized she shouldn't say it, just let him see it. She'd spent enough time in the institution to desperately want to not go back there again, and to not quite trust her own eyes. "Someone was in my car, it was unlocked and I think someone put something in the seat but I was too scared to look, will you walk out with me and check?"

"Of course honey," he answered without hesitation, and took off his glasses and set down the shoe rental logbook he was checking to follow.

The walk to the car seemed even longer now. John walked ahead of her, and opened the door while she still stood back a bit.

The fish man's hand was gone. So was most of the smell and every last one of the flies. Marta managed not to gasp, or show her surprise, even though John's back was to her. He clicked on the dome light. "I don't see anything, honey," John said softly, a little confused. She thought about asking John if he smelled the lingering scent of the fish man's hand, but didn't dare. She kept a car deodorizer hanging from the rear view mirror – the scent of the deodorizer was especially strong, as though someone had sprayed a matching scent into the car. Or maybe she was imagining that?

It took Marta a long time to speak. "I'm so sorry, I must have imagined it," she said, and tried to laugh but it didn't sound natural.

"You didn't get into the tequila, did you?" John teased. They kept cheap tequila and vodka behind the bar to make little slushy alcoholic cocktails.

"No, no I just … I'm just a little jumpy tonight, is all," Marta waffled.

"Well, get home safe. I don't want to lose my best cashier."

"I will, John. Thanks for checking with me," Marta said, trying to recover her cool, while she climbed into the car.

Marta turned it all over in her head over and over on the drive home – had she really seen it, really smelled it? Was she still smelling it now? Did people who were crazy smell things that weren't there too? If it had been someone – the man from earlier? – who put it there and took it away, how had they been sure to catch every fly?

Almost in answer to her own question, she heard a familiar buzzing once again, this time close by her ear. Not as loud this time – it was only one rogue fly that was still in the car, and it landed on the passenger window, looking for the way out.


End file.
